Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an easy fun Shakespeare play about love. There are two love stories, but I enjoyed the more comical one of Beatrice and Benedick the most. It's not terribly feminist, and I'm left feeling a bit cold for Claudio, who, in addition to jealousy and trust issues, doesn't seem to mind a replacement bride quite as much as he should.

"In brief, since I do
purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any
purpose that the world can say against it; and
therefore never flout at me for what I have said
against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my
conclusion." - Benedick

With Jaime at Much Ado at Shakespeare in the Park, Boston 2004

Much Ado at Shakespeare in the Park, Boston 2004

View all my reviews

The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol

The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bureaucracy in society = loss of humanity. I agree 100%.

My mother died this year, and my father already died 7 years ago. Do I get to mourn my mother and my complete loss of parents at my leisure? No. Everything related to dealing with my mother’s death is a nightmare. Most recently I’m fighting with Cobra because they put in their system that she died a month before she did, even though they had a death certificate that says the correct date and they know it is their error. I expect that this error will cascade into many more errors as I get rejected payments for her end of life care. This is just one of many problems I've encountered with the bureaucracy of death.

Additionally, I got an incorrect tax bill this year because my former boss filed his end of the taxes incorrectly. I have to jump through several hoops to correct errors other people made. This began while my mother was literally on her deathbed and has still not been resolved. Being powerless against the machinery of the IRS has a special irony this year, in this the year of President Trump.

Do I want to come back after my death and haunt all these institutions, customer service representatives, politicians that do nothing to regulate this, and society in general? You bet I do.

View all my reviews

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This just didn't need to be 600 pages long. 100-200 would have been sufficiently long to convey all the major plot points and good sentences. I gave it an extra star for social commentary/ defense of the poor. All theatrical productions of Oliver are superior to the lengthy book.

View all my reviews

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tolstoy trying to figure out the meaning of life. Remarkably similar to my own experiences except I never got to be a successful sinful writer. Haha. I don't feel terribly satisfied with the end of his essay or my (same) current status. Hopefully, there's some step after this.

View all my reviews

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The most important, most true, most amazing thing I have ever read. I wish I had read it sooner and often.

Death is one of the most important things humans must confront, but most of don't until and unless we must. Instead, we are caught by surprise. When I had to confront it the first time, I couldn't believe how unprepared our society had left me. There is a lot of information that would make us able to handle it with more grace and less pain. The Death of Ivan Ilych perfectly captures the ironic surprise of the most important event of our lives which we all know will happen but surprises us nonetheless.

View all my reviews

Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw

Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Raina Petkoff of Bulgaria lets a Swiss soldier fighting for the Serbians hide in her room. He's run off from the war, and the locals are searching for him as an enemy. Riana is already engaged to a patriot soldier Sergius but falls in love with the anti-war/cowardly Swiss soldier. Sergius, on the other hand, isn't very smart and is a strange hypocritical cheater. It was amusing but I didn't get much else out of it. I wasn't particularly engaged by the characters.

View all my reviews

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have so many thoughts. One is that Moby Dick is an amazing work of literary fiction. It's also an amazing nonfiction book detailing nearly everything that was known at the time about sperm whales. I'm not sure it was a great idea to make these two amazing books into one. It certainly seems to throw a lot of people off- including me. This was my third attempt at reading Moby Dick and my first successful one. My first attempt was in high school, which I guess technically shouldn't count. It's probably useful to have some real grief or heartbreak in your life to understand some of the best sentences.

Another issue is that the foreshadowing is so out of control. Okay, I get it! This is a terrible idea!

The last three chapters pack an action-adventure punch and I was mystified by how Melville made the scenes come to life. There was a very cinematic feeling throughout.

Chapters 83, 93, and 110 were my favorite. They're so good that I don't need to justify 5 stars any further than those three chapters, but I'll add that my Kindle tells me I made 392 highlights.


View all my reviews

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My version had all 12 stories from the original The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is the third volume in the Sherlock Holmes series. The stories are all easy and fun and provide enough information that you can sometimes guess the conclusion, which makes them especially satisfying. You can fancy yourself as clever and crafty as Holmes himself. And yes, I just used the British expression "fancy" because of all this reading.

1. "A Scandal in Bohemia" A surprise! And a bit feminist.
2. "The Red-Headed League" - Somewhat obvious but fun.
3. "A Case of Identity" - So sad, and feels unresolved in a way.
4. "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" The mystery revolves around whether a son murdered his father. Interesting.
5. "The Five Orange Pips" - Anti-racism! 
6. "The Man with the Twisted Lip" - Kind of funny, but not a great story about poverty
7. "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" - Not my favorite.
8. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" - Creepy story about the death of a sister.
9. "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" - Woah, intense! A little scary.
10. "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" Bride disappears! Okay story.
11. "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" - Good one about son accused of stealing a coronet.
12. "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" Great but somewhat predictable story. I love how Watson concludes this one.

View all my reviews

The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman

The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't care that he didn't finish the Oregon Trail because I was sufficiently bored that I was glad he just called it quits and went home already. My interest in this book was of the silly childhood variety from playing the computer game of the same name. For that reason, my favorite parts were the parts where they pursued and killed buffalo. I know! I'm ridiculous. The various different Native American (First Nations?) tribes were in themselves super interesting and I think Parkman did try to differentiate between their traditions and culture, but I think he was significantly handicapped in this by his old-timey bias.

View all my reviews

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This a wonderful story, beautifully written, but wow. Is it about mental illness in a time when all its permutations were unknown? Is it, as suggested by the sentence, "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is best," a treatise on how a man may self-deceive himself about his own flaws by attributing them to his piety? Or is it a symbolic pitting of a Taoist against a Christian?

View all my reviews

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Just... not good. It's Poe's version of Sherlock Holmes or something. Bad.

View all my reviews

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Walden by Henry David Thoreau
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this my sophomore year in high school, and then subsequently went on a field trip with my class to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. I'm not sure how much I appreciated it then, but I recently reread it and it's clear that I couldn't totally appreciate it as a child. I love it as an adult. Thoreau seeks and achieves real freedom. But, Thoreau is the original Konmari. He has no kids and lives alone... even in those circumstances it's pretty hard to live like this, but his points are still worth thinking about.

My friend and I in front of Walden Pond, May 1995

View all my reviews

My Escape from Slavery by Frederick Douglass

My Escape from Slavery by Frederick Douglass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a follow-up to Douglass's autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and fills in the missing information about how he escaped from slavery.

Frederick Douglass is one of the best writers of all time. His subject matter is captivating, but his skill as a writer is both technically perfect and extremely moving.

Some favorite sentences:
"This contest was now ended; my chains were broken, and the victory brought me unspeakable joy."
"I was without home, without acquaintance, without money, without credit, without work, and without any definite knowledge as to what course to take, or where to look for succor."

And this! I love this: "While in this situation I had little time for mental improvement. Hard work, night and day, over a furnace hot enough to keep the metal running like water, was more favorable to action than thought; yet here I often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing the up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows was inflated and discharged."

Available free here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/doug...

View all my reviews

Salome by Oscar Wilde

Salome by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was a disturbing reimagining of the Bible story. It was fine.

View all my reviews

Lady Windmere's Fan by Oscar Wilde

Lady Windmere's Fan by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this play. Like An Ideal Husband it examines ethics and the error of judging others. Wilde's writing is always fabulous.

View all my reviews

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A hilarious comedy of errors full of thoughtfulness about ethics, politics, love, and marriage. I recommend it.

View all my reviews

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very fun short read. It's a bit spoiled by the fact that everyone knows the surprise before reading the book, but I still enjoyed the story. My other issues are that we never get to hear the juicy bad fun Mr. Hyde is up to and that Mr. Hyde seems to help Dr. Jekyll suppress him which makes no sense since Mr. Hyde is pure evil.

View all my reviews

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun mean-spirited fairytale. I enjoyed the writing, and I couldn't predict the course of the story, though I thought several times that I could. I can't decide if it was actually deep though. It pretends to be deep- it's about the damage we do to our soul when we make poor choices- but I'm not convinced it actually was deep.

View all my reviews

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A new favorite. An amazingly well-written memoir that brings the history of America to life. This should be required reading for every American high school student (preferably September of their freshman year) for how it elucidates the importance of education, human rights, and history. In this work, Douglass is also a powerful and moving religious leader that abides no hypocrisy.

View all my reviews

The Watsons by Jane Austen

The Watsons by Jane Austen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It's unfinished! I didn't realize that before I started reading it and it's really good, but then just stops in a super random early place in the story. I'd love to see this an an indie art project. Starts out like a normal awesome Jane Austen novel and then, apropos of nothing, all the characters just jump off a cliff.

Don't torture yourself by reading this.

View all my reviews